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James M. Norton was born in Bangor, Maine. He is the second of five children. His family moved to South Portland, ME, while he was still a baby, and he has lived there ever since, except for when he was away at school.

Jim has always liked living things and spent many hours as a child exploring the woods, streams, and ponds near his home. Over the years he adopted a lot of animals as pets – birds with broken wings, baby squirrels that fell out of the nest, frogs, turtles, and even snakes. A hobby of his as a child was drawing animals, and many of his early drawings of birds hang in his office today. Jim also made a lot of carvings and woodcuts of birds, deer, and whales.

Figuring Out What to Be
Even though Jim knew he wanted to become a doctor or scientist and would need to take a lot of science classes, he also liked to study languages. He was able to do both by going to a college (the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA) where he could study languages but also take the classes he needed to be able to apply to medical school. He has never been sorry for doing that as it gave him a broad education and not just a science-based education. After he graduated in 1967, Jim had a variety of interesting experiences before ending up at Dartmouth College to study physiology. He got his Ph.D. degree in Physiology in 1979.

Finding a Job
After he finished, Dr. Norton went back to Maine to get more training in research at the Maine Medical Center in Portland. There he also studied the heart and its blood vessels. It was while he was working there that he first learned about the University of New England’s College of Osteopathic Medicine (UNECOM), which had been started in 1978 in nearby Biddeford, ME. He visited the campus, met with the teachers and students, and liked it right away. So he applied for a job there, even though he didn’t really know if he had the skills or ability to take on all the teaching he would have to be doing. He got a job there and started in August of 1980.

At UNECOM, Dr. Norton is now a Professor and has been Chair of the department since 1986. He does a lot of teaching, serves on committees and does other things for the school, and still does research. The people in his department do all the teaching of physiology to medical students training to be family doctors or medical specialists. They also teach students who want to be physician assistants and nurse anesthetists (who help during surgery to put people to sleep).

Dr. Norton teaches classes about cells, nerves, muscle, the heart, and the lungs for all these students. He helps plan what classes will be taught and how to keep teachers up-to-date on what they teach and how they teach. He tries to show other teachers that they should be teaching students things they can’t get from reading textbooks.

Dr. Norton has given several talks at national dinosaur meetings and is writing papers about what he’s doing that he’s hoping to get printed in science magazines.

To do this type of research means Dr. Norton needs to visit museums, take pictures and measure dinosaur ribs and backbones, and then create a working model on the computer of the dinosaur backbone and rib cage. He hopes this work will help to answer the question of whether these animals were really warm blooded like us (not cold blooded like lizards and snakes) and acted a lot like the animal hunters of today, such as wolves or lions.

Dr. Norton's other project is working on how to help make teachers better at their job.

His recent models include making a model of the launch of the H.M.S. Bounty, including little figures of Lt. Bligh and the 18 other loyal crew members who were put into life boats and put out to sea. Another was a model of an Irish leather-covered boat that people think Irish monks used to sail to North America a long time ago. Now he is working on a model of Leonardo Da Vinci’s flying machine. His next project will be a model of a small boat used by 6 people to cross 800 miles of sea to reach South Georgia Island. It will have small crewmembers too.

Dr. Norton has also helped out his local American Heart Association chapter with different activities. While his sons were going to school, he was always busy with parent-teacher groups, building committees, and sports booster clubs.

He also helps out with the Dinosaur Discovery Center that was started by his brother who also likes dinosaurs. Both of them go to elementary classes and take models of dinosaur bones, teeth, skulls, and eggs to teach the students about dinosaur biology, physiology, evolution, and ecology. They are hoping to come up with materials on dinosaurs that teachers around the state can use in their classes.